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Review Summary

At one point in “Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders,” Mark Hopkins’s new documentary about that Paris-based humanitarian group, an Australian doctor stationed in Congo, his tongue loosened by a lot of local beer, unloads his scorn for Unicef and other, similar organizations. They approach mass suffering, he says, by way of theories, meetings and high-minded statements of principle, whereas he and other Doctors Without Borders physicians meet the consequences of war, epidemic and natural disaster one patient at a time. A more conventional kind of documentary might have delved deeper into the history and philosophy of the organization, one of whose founders was Bernard Kouchner, a former leftist militant who is now foreign minister in France’s right-of-center government. (A fascinating account of Mr. Kouchner’s career can be found in Paul Berman’s book “Power and the Idealists.”) And, similarly, if “Living in Emergency” had stuck more closely to the conventions of movies that seek to raise Western awareness of terrible situations elsewhere in the world, it would have explored what is going on in Liberia and Congo, where most of the film takes place. But that kind of contextualization would have been antithetical both to the organization’s mission and to Mr. Hopkins’s own interest, which is in the particular challenges faced by individual doctors who sign up for six-month tours in what they routinely describe as some of the worst places on earth. — A. O. Scott